The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 9

DEKE DIDN’T TURN on a siren or flip on a light, but the drivers in town seemed to recognize that he was on business and stayed out of his way. Once Deke cleared the curve at the elementary school and turned onto Creek Road he hit the gas. Mount Clyburn rose up ahead, shrouded in mist. They seemed to be driving straight into it.

“So you’re chief of what, exactly?” Pax said.

“Pardon?”

Pax raised his voice over the wind. “Police? Fire? The Cherokee tribe?”

Deke shrugged. “It’s just a nickname.”

“Right.”

“I helped set up the VFD, the volunteer fire department. Plus I do other, uh, community stuff. Keeping the peace.”

“You mean cop stuff.”

“County cops don’t like to patrol here. People don’t like the cops much either. They need somebody local to step in and help out sometimes.”

At least that explained the police scanner. “So do you get paid for this?”

Deke laughed. “It’s more of a barter system.”

“Sure. Chickens, goats, that kind of thing. Do you have a gun?”

“Hell no.”

“Deke, it’s Tennessee! Every hillbilly out here has a gun.”

“That’s a stereotype, man.” Pax laughed, and after a few beats, Deke said, “But yeah, everybody’s got a shotgun in the closet, and that’s why I make sure everybody knows I don’t carry. You see a twelve-foot mother walking up to your house it’s bad enough, but carrying a shotgun to boot? Last thing I need is some drunk chub so shit-scared he has to shoot me. Any more questions?”

“Yeah,” Pax said. “What do you do in this thing when it rains?”

“Rain is not allowed to enter this vehicle. I’m the fucking Chief.”

They reached Jo’s house and turned onto the steep, curved drive. Deke parked in front of the house. Tucked around the side of the house, as if trying to hide, was the back end of a light blue Prius.

“Amos was right,” Pax said. As if he had any idea who Amos was besides a voice on the phone. “The cops would never drive a hybrid.”

Deke stepped out of the Jeep and said, “Why don’t you stay here a second while I talk to these folks.”

He walked toward the car in the slumped stroll of the argos, long arms swinging slowly. He bent to look inside the back window of the vehicle, then stepped around the corner of the house and out of sight.

Pax looked up. The oak loomed over the house.

He unbuckled his seat belt and stepped down out of the Jeep, his knees a bit wobbly. Of course tourists would come here, he thought. In your tour of Monster Town, why not visit the place where the tragic blank girl lived, the tree where she died? He took a few steps toward the side of the house and then the front door banged open.

A white man in a T-shirt and cargo shorts burst through the doorway and leaped off the steps. He landed awkwardly, and a palm-sized chunk of silver flew out of his hand and landed in the grass. He looked up at Pax with a shocked expression, then sprang to his feet and ran pell-mell for the Toyota.

Pax looked back at the house, expecting Deke to come charging out the door, but the big man was nowhere to be seen. “Deke?” Pax called. “You okay?”

The Prius backed up, then swung around so that the nose was pointing at the Jeep. Pax thought about stepping into its path, then thought better of it. He moved to the driver’s side of the Jeep, leaned over the door, and pressed on the horn.

The Prius lurched forward, passed the Jeep, and headed down to the driveway. Pax looked back at the house just as Deke rounded the corner. He was bent over, legs and long arms churning, running like a huge gorilla. The motion looked much more natural than his usual gait. Graceful. Right.

“Car!” Pax said, and pointed down the road. A stupid gesture; Deke could see the car as easily as he could. The Prius slid around the first curve, spitting gravel.

Deke jerked left and launched himself down the hill, into the trees, on a path that cut through the S of the road like the slash in a dollar sign.

Pax had never seen anyone move so fast.

He opened the Jeep door with some vague idea of following, but then looked down at the pedals six feet from the driver’s seat and realized—or rather, remembered again—that he’d never be able to drive this thing. Plus, Deke had taken the keys. Maybe he should chase them down the gravel driveway? Before he could make up his mind he heard the shattering of glass and the scrape of tires locking up on loose gravel.

A minute later Deke appeared, walking upright back up the hill with the man slung over one shoulder like a deer carcass.

“He’s not dead, is he?” Pax asked.

“You’re hurting me!” the man said.

Deke strode up to the house, dropped the man onto his feet. “Inside,” Deke ordered him, argo voice set to Full Rumble.

Pax started to follow, then turned back to the yard. He looked around for a minute, then found the thing the man had dropped—a camera. By the time Pax got into the house the man was sitting on a couch, looking sour. Deke sat across from him, crouching to fit under the low ceiling.

The atmosphere was close, hotter than outside. And even without Deke’s huge body the room would have felt small. Bookshelves of varying heights lined the walls like battlements. Crowded into the center of the room were the couch and an easy chair in matching brown and blue plaid, worn but not worn out. Along one wall, a plank spanned two bookshelves, forming a long homemade desk. Three wooden chairs, a different colored pillow tied to each seat, were lined up along the desk. He pictured Jo and the two girls sitting in a row, doing homework.

“You smashed in my window,” the man said. He was a little younger than Pax, with a head shaped like a candy corn: a brush of bleached hair, a broad forehead, and cheekbones that narrowed to an elfin chin, a dark soul patch under his lower lip like the dot in an exclamation mark. Something about the hair and the deliberate counter-culture look said that he came from money.

“Next time you’ll stop,” Deke said. “Now, empty your pockets.”

“I didn’t steal anything!” he said. “I’m a journalist.”

“Really,” Pax said. He swung the camera on its nylon lanyard. “For who?”

The man didn’t answer. Deke grabbed him by the front of the shirt. Pax said, “I think you should answer our questions.”

“Fuck you,” the man said.

Deke grabbed him by his face, his fist completely engulfing his head, and the man screamed into it. Deke’s face was rigid with anger. His white arm trembled, as if he were on the verge of cracking his skull like an egg.

“Deke! Shit, Deke!”

Deke held the man for several seconds. Then the trembling stopped, and Deke released him. He felt to the floor, gasping.

“Your pockets,” Deke said.

According to his driver’s license he was Andrew Weygand, twenty-three years old, from Wheeling, West Virginia, and an organ donor. He said he ran a website called TheOpenSwitch.com. “TOS does investigative articles, opinion pieces—”

“Jesus, he’s a blogger,” Pax said. “Arrest him, Deke.”

“You’re a cop?” the man said. Pax couldn’t tell if he was alarmed or relieved.

“He’s the fucking Chief,” Pax said. Deke sighed.

The man said, “I didn’t even break in, you know. The back door was open.”

“Right.”

Weygand said he was looking for someone called Brother Bewlay. Pax glanced at Deke—he couldn’t tell if Deke recognized the name.

“It’s the screen name for a guy who posted to the blog a lot,” Weygand said. “TOS is supposed to be just about the Switchcreek Event, but it gets pretty tangential—government conspiracies, fringe science, political activism, you name it—all the usual nut-job issues, right? I let anyone comment as long as they don’t get abusive. Brother Bewlay, though, was one of the serious posters. He knew his facts. Personally, I suspected pretty early that he was from Switchcreek. He never said so, probably because no one would believe him. Anybody can say they went through the Changes, right? But Bewlay—sometimes he said stuff that seemed so insightful and weird that it had to be true.” Pax looked up questioningly, and Weygand said, “Like how betas weren’t really male or female, they were a new, third sex. He won a lot of converts. Of course, some people thought he was a total bullshitter, and there were plenty of flame wars, but—hey, careful with that?”

Pax looked up from the camera screen. He’d sat on one of the wooden chairs and started clicking backward through the recent shots in the machine’s memory. The first thirty pictures were of the inside of the house, five or six per room, as if Weygand was going to make a virtual tour of the place.

“Never mind the camera,” Deke said.

“Is he okay?” Weygand asked. “He looks like he’s going to pass out.”

“I’ve had a tough week,” Pax said.

“Get to Switchcreek,” Deke said to the man. “What you’re doing here.”

Weygand took a breath, his eyes still on the camera in Paxton’s hands. “About a week and a half ago Bewlay went offline, no explanation. It’s usually not a big deal, right? And we were all so busy talking about the suicide in Switchcreek that nobody noticed for a while. I finally emailed him—we’d had a lot of personal conversations outside the blog—and when I didn’t get an answer after a few days I thought, oh shit. Now I never do this—I believe in privacy, right? But I pulled the server logs and did a lookup on his address. The IP was definitely coming from the Lambert area. I decided I had to find out if he—if she was him.”

“How would you know?” Deke asked. “If Bewlay didn’t tell you anything about himself—”

“Her computer,” Weygand said. “If some of Bewlay’s files are on there, then that’s that, right? But even if I couldn’t get onto the computer, I thought maybe there’d be something in the house that he mentioned in one of his messages. Like—okay, look at this book I found.”

Weygand popped up and went to the bookshelf. “This Richard Dawkins’ book, The Ancestor’s Tale? Bewlay quoted from it, more than once.”

Pax took the book from his hand. It was a thick, beige paperback with a heavily creased spine. The book flopped open in his hand to a chapter headed “The Gibbon’s Tale.” Under a complicated diagram Jo or someone had written in the margins, “Missing branches—clade tree unrooted?”

“Anybody could have read this,” Pax said, though he’d never heard of the book. The others on the shelf were heavy on medicine—a Physicians’ Desk Reference, The Handbook for Genetic Diseases and Disorders, Modern Obstetrics—but there were an equal number of books on physics, quantum mechanics, and evolution. The Dawkins guy had his own shelf.

Weygand reached for another book. “Okay, look! This physics book by David Deutsch? Bewlay talked about it and I went out and read it myself. Bewlay was the first person on the boards to find scientists who were applying quantum computation and quantum evolution theories to explain the Changes. He even started posting articles from the physics journals.”

Weygand looked from Pax to Deke, excited now. “See, Bewlay’s big thing was that the Switchcreek clades weren’t diseased, they weren’t damaged humans—they were alternate humans, with genetic information ported in from a parallel universe. Quantum teleportation, man.”

Deke stared at him. “What?”

“Look, it’s not that crazy. Do you guys know about the intron mutation counts?”

Deke looked at Pax. “Paxton, what was I just saying about that in the car?”

“I think you said they were undersold and overhyped. Or the other way around.”

Weygand’s smile was half-lit—he couldn’t tell if they were playing with him. “Okay, everybody knows that TDS screwed with the DNA of people who caught the disease, but nobody suspected that the number of changes would increase with second-generation children, the ones born with TDS. Introns are these parts of the DNA that change faster than other parts.”

Deke said, “What does this have to do with the children?”

“Okay, with second-generation children there’s, like, a huge difference in the introns—it’s like the kids descended from a completely different species than their parents.”

Pax looked at Deke. Deke shrugged. “So TDS scrambles the introns too.”

Weygand only seemed exasperated by their ignorance. “Not scrambled—different. People with the same type of TDS show the same changes. Betas have intron sequences like other betas, argos look like argos. And betas are as different from argos and charlies as they are from normal—uh, people who don’t have TDS. You see what this means?”

They didn’t see.

Weygand said, “Look, imagine if evolution took a completely different course millions of years ago. Let’s say our ancestors died out, and instead some slightly different cousins took over. Neanderthals, say. If today those cousins dug us up and sucked some of the marrow out of our bones and looked at the DNA, these are the differences they’d expect to find, right? It’s like betas and argos and charlies are visitors from another world, a parallel universe—you’re what humans would have turned into if our ancestors had taken a few left turns two million years ago.”

Deke shifted his weight, leaned forward. Even crouching he loomed over Weygand.

“So,” Pax said. “You’re saying Deke isn’t human.”

Weygand looked up at the huge man, his mouth working. “No! I mean, well, he’s a kind of human.”

The man yelped as Deke placed a huge bony hand on his shoulder.

“You’re going to do something for me,” Deke said. “You’re going to go get the shiny little laptop I saw in your car and you’re going to send me every email that Brother Bewlay sent you.”

“I can’t forward you private email! I’m a journalist!”

“Don’t make me break you,” Deke said.

The rain came down hard, hammering steam from the ground. Pax sat by the front picture window with the side of his head resting against the glass so that he felt it shudder with each gust of wind. Deke looked over Weygand’s shoulder as the man fussed with the silver Apple laptop. Weygand was constantly complaining in a small voice: Deke had no right to do this; the inside of Weygand’s car was getting soaked; Jo Lynn wouldn’t appreciate how Deke was treating him. But he did as he was told and answered the big man’s questions. Pax kept being surprised by Deke’s easy authority. When they were kids Deke was a follower, a pup, eager for Paxton’s approval, ready to follow him or Jo wherever they went. Now he was a leader, a goddamn chief. Which one was the true Deke? Did his huge gray frame armor a timid boy, or had the boy always felt like an undiscovered giant?

Or maybe they were both true. Maybe there was nothing essential to a person that could be separated from the muscle and blood and chemicals that motored him around; maybe everything depended on the body, was dictated by it. He thought of Deke charging into the woods, moving like a freight train. Maybe it was the residue of the vintage in his bloodstream, but Pax could imagine himself inside that powerful body, long arms churning, lungs working easily in the humid air.

Pax was jerked awake by a touch. Deke stood over him. “I’m escorting Andrew here to his car and then right out of town.”

“Okay,” Pax said. He leaned back in the chair, his neck aching. Outside, the rain had slacked off. Weygand stood by the door looking petulant. “I’ll wait for you here.”

“I thought you might say that.”

When they’d gone, Pax got up, opened a few of the books on the shelves, put them back. After awhile he went down the carpeted hallway, past the small functional bathroom to the pair of bedrooms. The door to his left was open. Most of the space in the room was taken up by a bunk bed. Two of the walls were painted pale yellow, the other two sea foam, matching the stripes on the comforters on the unmade beds. There were two identical dressers, cheap pine. The drawers were ajar, as if that morning the girls had hopped out of bed and dressed hurriedly, late for the school bus. He felt a vague sense of déjà vu, then realized it must be because he’d just seen all this in Weygand’s camera.

The other bedroom was smaller, and more plain—a beige double bed in a simple wood frame, a low mirrored dresser, plain white walls—as if all the energy for decoration had been spent in the girls’ room. The only color came from the covers of the books stacked up along one wall. A single, curtained window looked out over the backyard.

The bed was still made, unslept in since the night before she died. He pulled back the bedspread and lay down on his side. He pressed his face into the single white pillow and inhaled deeply.

The scent was too subtle for him to tease apart. A hint of flowers that could have been perfume or detergent, a faint muskiness that might have been Jo’s scent or simply the effects of humidity in the closed house. With a stab of sadness he realized that he couldn’t recall how she smelled. Once he’d known her body—and Deke’s—as well as his own. No, better. After the Changes, all skin had become strange, and in that first year he and Jo and Deke mapped their bodies for each other.

And then he had left them. The only people who knew him.

Somewhere a door creaked open. He quickly rolled off the bed and wiped the tears from his cheeks. He listened for Deke’s heavy steps, but nothing came. Still, the feeling persisted that he was not alone.

Jesus, he thought. I’m a fucking mess.

He tucked the covers back over the pillow, and tugged on the bedclothes to smooth out the creases. Then he heard a clink, like someone setting a glass into the kitchen sink.

He went to the door of the room, leaned out. Far down the hallway, opposite the open door to the kitchen, a lozenge of light lay upon the wall. A shadow flitted across it, slowly slid back, and then vanished. For a moment it had looked like the silhouette of a face. Jo’s face.

He stood there for a full minute, staring at the light, waiting for the shadow to return. Because he was alone he didn’t have to pretend that he wasn’t freaked out. Finally he left the room and stepped quietly down the hall. When he reached the edge of the kitchen doorway he stopped and studied the light on the wall. He decided that even with his imagination straining at the leash he couldn’t see anything moving in it. He turned quickly and entered the kitchen, fists clenched.

The kitchen door hung open. Outside, the trunk of the oak tree rose up out of his line of sight.

The rain had stopped. He stepped outside onto the wet, shining grass. He looked at the tire, then up at the rope. He still couldn’t imagine Jo doing that to herself.

He walked over to the plastic patio set and righted a chair that had blown over. As he straightened he saw in his peripheral vision two small figures drop down out of the trees at the edge of the lawn. They hit the ground and almost instantly vanished into the woods.

Two children with wine-dark arms and legs, bare heads like marbles.

Pax whisked the water from the seat of the chair and sat. For a while he scanned the tree line, wondering if the girls would come back or if they’d been scared back to the Co-op. The Whitmer farm was probably only a half mile away as the crow flies. There were paths all through these woods.

Deke’s Jeep rumbled up the driveway. He heard the big man go in the front of the house and a minute later come out behind him.

“There you are. How you doing, man?”

“Just great,” he said. What he needed, he thought, was to see his father. What he needed was a touch of vintage. Instead he said, “You remember ‘The Bewlay Brothers’?”

“‘Kings of oblivion,’” Deke said, quoting from the song. The final track on Bowie’s Hunky Dory. They’d listened to the album dozens of times at Jo’s old house.

“So he was definitely talking to Jo,” Pax said. “We should still check her computer, though. Maybe she was talking to other people.”

Deke shook his head. “It’s not here. I’ve looked.”

“When?”

He shrugged. “I broke in yesterday.”

Pax looked up at him, smiling. “Really?”

“Searched everywhere. Somebody got here before me.”

“Maybe the girls took it.”

“I asked the reverend. She was there that morning—her and Tommy were called right after the police. She packed the girls’ things and said she didn’t see it.”

“The twins are clever girls,” Pax said. “I think they’ve been back since that night.” He told him about the girls dropping out of the trees and scampering away like squirrels.

Deke didn’t seem surprised. “At least Weygand didn’t get a picture of them,” he said. He snapped something between his thick fingers and flicked the pieces into the grass.

“Camera memory card?” Pax guessed.

“Not anymore.”

Pax laughed. “You know, when I saw you charge out of the house, I thought you were going to kill him. And then when he told you to fuck off …”

Deke took a breath. “Yeah. Me too.”

“You’re serious,” Pax said.

Deke squatted beside him, his forearms resting on his knees. “I have a temper problem.”

“What? You’re the calmest guy I know.”

“I’m the carefullest guy you know,” Deke said. “I slipped up once. Now I have to … Well. Let’s just say I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.”

Pax laughed, and then they lapsed into silence. They sat without talking for several minutes. In the north people didn’t just sit, Pax realized. Not unless they were on the bus or trapped in a waiting room. You said what you needed to say, then you moved on. At some point in the past dozen years he’d stopped noticing the Yankee rush to fill the silence.

Pax said, “So did you know about this stuff? That she was online, talking to people about Switchcreek?”

Deke exhaled heavily. “I didn’t know, but it didn’t surprise me. Jo didn’t have many people to talk to in this town—people who could keep up with her, anyway. You know how she was. Didn’t suffer fools.”

“Oh yeah.” She had scholarship brains. Nobody had expected her to stay in Switchcreek—until the Changes. Until she got pregnant. “You think Jo believed all that crazy shit Weygand was saying? I mean, her own girls. She couldn’t really think they were …” He gestured vaguely. “Alternate universe babies.”

“Just because she was smart doesn’t mean she was always right,” Deke said. “Look.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet the size of a bank bag. With his thick fingers he fished out a heavily creased piece of paper and handed it to Pax.

Pax unfolded it. It was a printout of a black-and-white photo, a long-range shot blown up to the point of blurriness. In the foreground were pine trees, a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence was a wide, snow-covered plain. Half a dozen low, barracks-like buildings sat in the distance. Three figures were moving between two buildings. Two of them were clearly argos, all long arms and sloped back. Running ahead of them was a much smaller figure moving on all fours. Scale was difficult to assess, but considering the size of the argos, the third figure could have been a pony or a large dog.

“Jo gave that to me a couple years ago,” Deke said. “She found it on the web. Said it came from China.”

“Wait—argos in China?”

Deke shrugged.

Pax said, “What’s that other thing, in front of them?”

“Can’t you tell? That’s an argo child.”

Pax stared at the picture. “No fucking way.”

“There’s all kinds of theories. People think there was another Change, before Switchcreek. Completely covered up. Or maybe more than one—China in the sixties, Russia in the eighties. Or in the States, the usual secret military base in the desert. All that Area Fifty-one shit.”

Pax said, “So this picture—”

“Doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

“What?”

Deke held out a hand, and Pax gave the paper back to him. “It’s a hoax, P.K. Urban myth, like Sasquatch. There’s dozens of pictures like these on the web. Hundreds maybe. It’s all done with computers, people jackin’ around.” He folded it up and placed it back in his wallet. “Argos in Mexico, betas in the northwest, chubs hanging out with Elvis. This ain’t even one of the convincing ones.”

“But if Jo gave it to you she must have thought—”

“Jo wanted to be fooled as much as anyone, Paxton. No one wants to think we’re alone out here. It’s the town disease.”